


for whatever we lose, (like a you or a me)

by ReyloTrashCompactor (NextToSomething)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Canon, Suicidal Thoughts, Swimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 22:13:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8177999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/pseuds/ReyloTrashCompactor
Summary: For a girl who had grown up only knowing enough water to coat the inside of a gritty mouth, Rey was a natural swimmer.“Still can’t resist wreckage, can you, scavenger?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains some heavy/upsetting themes. Tread lightly.

For a girl who only knew enough water to coat the inside of a gritty mouth, Rey was a natural swimmer.

Well, not natural. Entirely hard, compact muscle, she sank like a stone the first time Finn threw her in the lake. Poe was close behind, dragging her back to the surface sputtering. A word or two on the finer points of buoyancy, however, and Rey was lapping the boys by the afternoon.

When they had returned for their evening meal, Rey’s mind kept wandering back to the lake, to the wonder of enough water to float atop it. She went to her quarters that evening, but she couldn’t sleep. She was restless, suddenly feeling too heavy in her own skin. So she changed back into her swimming outfit from earlier, ignoring the stiffness of the fabric and the distinct fishy smell that clung to it. She’d be wet again soon and it wouldn’t matter.

She threw on a long linen robe and made for the lake.

* * *

 

Swimming in the dark was even better. Warmed from the day in the sun, the water was the same temperature as the night, and at this late hour, the same color. It felt like being supported by the very stuff of the skies, and Rey felt foolishly complete for the first time since…

She’d never felt like this before, actually.

Jakku held nothing for her but the sandy grit of an unkept promise. An unfinished thought, a song abandoned after only a measure. That dry, hot heat she associated with the hope for a different tomorrow---always wanting, never quite having. There was no comfort in constant hunger and a need for a story that included her as a character, that gave her insight to the past pages and what the plot had planned.

Being on the run with Finn had been exciting, difficult, and more than she could have ever imagined back on Jakku. But it was frantic; a different sort of survival. One that did not allow for such peace as would come with a full night’s sleep, even cramped in the bowels of a felled mechanical beast. Having someone there with her, someone who wanted the same things she did, was closer to complete, but not quite.

Then Starkiller. She’d fractured there. Still dizzy with the confusion Maz bestowed on her, and then Kylo Ren’s unsettling eyes, she’d felt more lost than when she’d been dumped in the sand as a youngling. The connection she felt with him when he looked into her---when she looked back---it was a denser sort of completion. A connection that was not welcome and knew its worth far too well. She tried viciously to block that feeling of him, how this strange power---the Force---rolled from him. Nudged against her own power, coaxing her to rise to his. She hated that she found profound kindredship in one so oppressively corrupt as he. He was not the other half she wanted.

So she turned her back on it, on him. Handed Luke Skywalker his old saber and more than a little to think about. Received meditation and form training at his mismatched hands for the price of her fire. She didn’t regret refusing Kylo Ren’s offer of training, but she wondered at the superiority of Master Skywalker’s teachings. It was too cut and dry to her mind. Dark and Light. Passion and serenity. But she had learned enough to fight the good fight with him. Every day the Resistance was getting closer to defeating the First Order, to bringing an end to Snoke’s reign. The prisoners of war continued to arrive and their intelligence on the Order grew.

They would know peace soon enough.

Master Skywalker would be glad for that.

So, for now, she swam in the dark, feeling more whole than she ever had.

* * *

 

Rey made swimming in the lake a near nightly habit. Poe warned her against swimming alone, so she saved her more acrobatic dives off the pier for daylight hours. At night, she simply slipped into the water and enjoyed the feeling of lightness.

Taking a deep breath, she ducked under the water and began swimming down to see if she could touch the bottom. Being submerged was better than meditating. It felt like the Force, in a way. The water all around her, pressing against her in a not entirely unpleasant way. Supporting her. Drenching her.

Threatening to crush her should she dive too deep. Suffocate her if she stayed under too long.

When she broke the surface, her head turned sharply back to the pier.

He was there, sitting on the dock. She knew he was on base. He’d been captured many weeks before, coming peacefully enough, for whatever reason. His sentencing had taken almost the entirety of the weeks he had been on the planet---the charges were of that great and immeasurable a number.

Rey wasn’t sure of the specifics, just that his sentence was for life, that it came with very little freedom. His life was only spared due to the intelligence he was able to provide regarding Snoke himself. And perhaps his mother’s influence.

For this mercy---if not everything else---Kylo Ren was a hated man.

Rey didn’t know what she was supposed to do. He had seen her, surely, when she rose from under the water. She could continue swimming; ignore him. Maybe he would leave before she wanted to get out.

Or she could go to him. Rey shook her head against that thought. Not _go to him._ She could walk past him when she got out. His sitting on the pier didn’t have any bearing on her.

She decided to leave.

She swam a purposeful line back to the pier, not entirely sure if he was watching her or not. She pulled herself out slowly, so as to not splash him.

“It’s dangerous to swim alone,” he said, his eyes still out over the lake.

His words brought her up short, and she stood at the edge of the pier looking down at him. Rey hadn’t expected him to talk to her, nor had she expected her skin tightening into gooseflesh at the sound of his soft voice.

Then he did look at her.

His eyes were shadowed, the moon behind him, but she suddenly felt very exposed in her swimming clothes, dripping wet. The dark fabric of the tunic and shorts clung to her body, and she felt he could see every inch of her. She wished she could see his eyes. See how intently he was looking.

No sooner had she thought this before that pulse of a connection surged through her. Suddenly, she _knew_ the intensity of his gaze. The knowledge gripped her low in her gut and she felt her nipples harden under her now cold shirt.

The faint glistening of his tongue caught in the moonlight as he wet his lips.

She hurried past him, snatching up her robe from beside him as she went. He was sitting nearly on top of it and the sash was caught under him. It pulled loose of the robe as she rushed past, and she turned back at the tug of it. He held it up to her in an open hand, his face now fully lit by the moon. A great white scar cleaved his face. He wasn’t leering. And he wasn’t smiling.

She left without the sash.

* * *

 

When she sat down to lunch the next day, Finn noticed immediately that something was troubling her.

“You should just talk about whatever is bothering you. You won’t eat until you do.”

Her head snapped up at his joking tone. She hadn’t realized that she was just pushing food around on her plate until he pointed it out. Or that this was apparently one of her tells.

“What…” She speared a bite of purple tuber on her fork and twirled it between her fingers, thinking. “What _exactly_ is Kylo Ren’s sentence for his war crimes? I hadn’t heard what it was specifically, except that it was...severe.”

Poe sat down heavily beside Finn and began immediately to pick things off his own salad and placing them on Finn’s plate. Finn in turn looked down at his own plate and began to scrape the entire mound of mashed something onto Poe’s tray. Rey watched this wordless exchange of mess food in happy silence. The two were inseparable and cloyingly, perfectly suited for each other.

“What’s severe?” Poe asked before taking a large bite of the combined mash from both the men’s plates.

“Kylo Ren’s sentence,” Finn answered.

Poe snorted. “Some say it wasn’t severe enough.” Some thought crinkled his heavy brow as he huffed at the thought. Then his hand wandered to his neck, rubbing absently, and he sobered. “I think it was just punishment. I know anything more would have been difficult for the General.”

Finn clarified. “It’s a sort of house arrest. Only, the house in question is this Resistance base. He’s on a very restricted schedule, and has to report to the General daily to discuss any new intelligence they’ve brought in.”

Rey shook her head. “That doesn’t seem so bad.”

Poe looked down at his food. “They have him in a Collar,” he said in a voice much smaller than what Rey was used to hearing. He found another bit of his salad that he didn’t want and moved it to Finn’s plate.

“A Collar?” Rey asked.

“To make sure he doesn’t escape,” Finn replied. “If he goes beyond a certain boundary that he is allowed…”

Poe made a sharp slicing gesture across his neck, still not meeting Rey’s eyes.

“Oh.”

Rey’s appetite didn’t return after that.

* * *

 

She lay awake that night, debating going back to the lake. It was to the point that she almost couldn’t sleep without a night swim to tire her body out sufficiently.

But it was a very real possibility that Ren might be there when she arrived.

She didn’t know how to be around him. He was a very bad man, this she knew. She had experienced his cruelty first hand, and his cold hand rifling through her mind was a phantom she couldn’t shake.

But they had forged a connection. Somehow, since that night, she could always feel his faint pulse. It was different than being around those sensitive to the Force. It was different than the awesome power that Master Luke held behind his controlled movements.

She could feel _him._ Sense _him._ Not just the Force within him, but whatever made him _Kylo Ren_. Or perhaps what was left of Ben Solo. She knew his _want_ for her, for her power.

She was frightened, very frightened, that he knew her, too. That this was a connection that traveled in two directions. And there were parts of her she wanted to preserve. What _she_ wanted. What she saw when she looked at him in the moonlight: something that she feared, but something to which she felt startlingly drawn.

The Force within her had forged an alliance with the Force within him, and she wanted to know _why._

She got out of bed, quickly changed, and made quick work of the path leading to the lake.

He was there, sitting in the same position he had the night before. The sash to her robe lay neatly folded beside him. She picked it up and laced it through her robe, before folding and placing the whole thing a safe distance from him.

Then, if for no other reason other than wanting to show off, she backed up several steps and took off toward the end of the pier at a run. Gripping with her toes, she threw herself into a high, arching dive that knifed her deep into the black water. She stayed under as long as she could stand and then for a moment longer, her senses screaming at her for air, the very edges of panic starting to trickle into her synapses.

When she resurfaced, he was on his feet, tensed as if ready to dive in after her.

There was one question answered, then.

She pointedly ignored him after that, though she felt his eyes on her. They were most keen when she spread her arms out wide and floated at the surface of the water. It was an especially bright night, the moon very close and nearly full. She knew how well he could see her body, felt the hem of her tunic floating somewhere near the curve of her sternum. She wasn’t sure what she meant by this, almost posturing for him. She didn’t entirely know to what end she hoped this would lead.

So she swam to the pier and pulled herself out of the water.

“I told you once already, girl.” His tone was low and gruff. “I feel it, too.” He looked over at her, cataloged the look of her wet body in detail that made Rey hot with embarrassment as it traveled over their link. “There’s no need to test me.”

She didn’t bother to don the robe as she ran for the sanctuary of her rooms.

* * *

 

She didn’t go back to the lake the next night and rested poorly as a result. Her body was too wound up after a day spent going through meditations and forms with Master Luke. On Jakku, she beat her body into sheer and utter exhaustion every day. Pushed to the outer limits of fatigue by climbing through behemothic ships and wrenching rusted scraps from their bellies. Trekking through a landscape that was never steady underfoot and required a core of duracrete for a thin thing like her to stay upright.

Her strength served her well in her training with Luke, but she couldn’t find sleep unless she was thoroughly exhausted. Handstands were nothing compared to scavenging for her livelihood in a thrice picked over starship.

Swimming helped to expend that extra energy. It was a gentler exhaustion than what she found in the desert, but it cured her insomnia within a matter of days.

The second night without it found her growling with frustration when she couldn’t find the wherewithal to lie still. She threw off the blankets in a huff and changed, telling herself it didn’t matter if he was there. It didn’t matter. He did not affect her.

He would not affect her.

But as she approached the lake and saw his shadowed figure on the pier, she knew it wasn’t true. She stopped some distance away, just looking at him.

He sat very still, his posture bent and horrendous. For reasons beyond her, she found herself reaching out across the this strange connection of theirs. It was like walking a tightwire, feeling the vibration of every step as she edged her mind slowly closer. Then she felt it---the overwhelming loneliness, the self-loathing, the anger. Shame and impotence.

His head shot up, and the taught wire between them snapped _._ He turned to face her, and she felt rather than saw his scowl. She was far enough away that she could veer her path, avoid the lake altogether and walk back to her rooms. But he stood, facing the moonlight and letting his wretchedness be seen.

She walked toward him.

When she reached him on the pier, she was startled again by his size. He wasn’t quite so large as he was in the full dress of his prior life, his head bare and cloakless. But even in the simple garb of a Resistance base civilian, he was massive. Broad and strong, his towering presence was made all the more evident by the tension in his shoulders and his clenched fists.

“Still can’t resist wreckage, can you, scavenger?”

She was prepared for the sound of his voice this time. She steeled herself against it. But still, even knowing the round and low timbre of it, the jagged edge added by his utter defeat, she shuddered as it passed over her.

He smiled, and it was the saddest gesture she could imagine.

“I came for a swim,” she said with an upward tilt of her chin. She couldn’t look down her nose at him, but she could try. “I missed last night.”

“I know,” he said. “I waited for you. Nearly missed my curfew.” He sneered at the word.

“Why---” she muttered before she could stop herself. She didn’t want to know why he would wait for her. She shouldn’t want to know, at least.

He smiled again, seeming to enjoy her conflict. “I like to watch you.”

His words coupled with his smile sent creeping tendrils of cold up her neck and, more disturbingly, something hot and heavy churned behind her navel. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to disarm her with his honesty--- _was it honesty?_ \---or to run her off. She took step back, and his smile vanished.

“Please stay.” His words were soft, and those eyes that could conjure even the most reluctant sympathy bore heavily down on her.

 _Honesty, then._ The knowledge did nothing to comfort her.

She walked past him, but did not get into the water. Instead, she sat on the edge of the pier and waited.

It took him some moments to follow suit, longer than she would have thought from a man who had just pleaded with her to stay. He sat down heavily beside her, his head dropping into his hands.

That’s when she saw it.

Just below the dark fringe of his hair at the nape of his neck sat a small, gleaming metal mechanism, about the size of the flip-top lighters some of the pilots carried. It was nestled snugly into the skin of his neck. She leaned closer and her stomach turned. Scar tissue surrounded it, pink and angry, and she could see that this...thing...was likely attached to his very bones. Two slender arms protruded from its sides, circling around Kylo Ren’s neck, crafted from that same shining metal.

“Haven’t seen it up close before, have you?” he asked, his voice muffled by his hands.

She shook her head. “I hadn’t seen it at all,” she whispered.

“A Collar,” he clarified. “Welded directly onto my third vertebra using a very special calcium based solder.” He sounded almost proud of this gruesome thing attached to him, as if the lurid punishment made him more formidable by comparison. Rey felt the urge to look away as surely as she felt the sick compulsion to look harder.

He raised his head and indicated at the two arms of the Collar that circled and hugged either side of his neck, ending with rounded points on either side of his Adam’s apple. “These are special,” he murmured, his voice growing use a little darker, more frantic at detailing the merits of his metallic warden. “When I get close to my limits within the base, these---” he laid reverent fingers on the glinting metal, “---begin to compress my jugular arteries, incapacitating me within seconds.”

She shivered.

His eyes traced over her face, over the fear he inevitably saw there, and he snatched her hand from her lap. She attempted to jerk it back, but his grip was firm. “Not half so wicked at this thing, though,” he said as he laid her fingers upon the box at the back of his neck. Her fingers curled awkwardly over the thing, tangling in his hair and touching his hot skin. “If I somehow manage to work past the jugular compression---board a ship, perhaps, or work to remove the device entirely---this clever little thing will neatly slice my spinal cord.”

He snapped his fingers on the hand that wasn’t pressing hers to the deadly device. The metal of the foul little box was hot with his flushed skin, and she whipped her hand away at the crack of his snap.

He looked half deranged. His eyes were too wide, and his features too calm. He talked about his imminent death with the detachment of a droid listing coordinates, and it made Rey want to either run very far away or draw him to her, shake him until his sense returned.

“That’s…” Her voice shook and she could help but wonder if she didn’t look a little mad herself. “That’s monstrous.”

Something touched him then, something calm and sad. His taut face relaxed and he nodded slowly. “Well, I am a monster.”

She did look away, then. To see his face settle back into sanity and to hear her past words echoed back to her made it difficult to keep her eyes open at all, let alone continue to look at this ruin of a man.

The silence stretched thick and heavy between them, like congealed sludge in an engine long out of repair. Rey looked out over the water, watched the ripples break the reflection of the full moon into jagged shards. She sighed, and flopped back onto the pier so she might look up at the stars, see the moon whole instead of fractured on the water’s surface.

She watched from the corner of her eye as he lay back against the rough wood of the pier as well, his arms crossed behind his head in a recline too casual for the words passing between them.

“You're attracted to me,” he said suddenly.

She sat up, propping herself on her elbows, and shot him an appalled glare. “Excuse me?”

“That nervousness you feel when you look at me, that heat? You find me attractive.”

“I don’t---” she sputtered, her face growing warm with that heat he so baldly mentioned. “How would you know what I---”

“You know how I know,” he said, his tone bland. He turned on his side, looking her over. “There's nothing wrong with it, girl. Wanting me.”

“I don’t,” she snapped. She sat up completely and pulled her robe snugly around her. Her heart thundered with embarrassment---not just from his blunt assessments, but also from needing to be told at all. As if she wouldn’t recognize desire if it were lying sprawled on the pier next to her.

“Suit yourself,” he sighed as he rolled back onto his back.

She shucked off her robe in angry jerks and dived into the water. She wasn’t nearly so graceful this time as before, but the compulsion to put space between them was too strong for her to care.

She swam far out into the lake, hoping to be too far for him to pick out her shape from where he sat. She made determined laps in the moonlight, hoping with each pass to drive out that shame she felt, to burn off that fire his words kindled in her.

_There’s nothing wrong with it, girl. Wanting me._

But there was. Wanting a man with whose crimes were so great that he wore his own death around his neck was just about as wrong as it gets.

When she finally dragged herself from the water, shaking and exhausted, he was gone.

* * *

Rey arrived at the dock early the next night. It wasn’t quite full dark yet; vestiges of twilight still lingered at the very edge of the sky. She’d beat him here, if he was coming at all. She stood awkwardly at the edge of the dock, unsure if she wanted to sit down and wait for him or dive into the water. It should have been an easy choice. She ended her nights with a swim because it helped her sleep; that’s why she was here. It never had anything to do with---

“I want you, too, you know?”

She lurched at his voice and almost stumbled off the pier. A large hand that easily spanned the circumference of her upper arm and then some yanked her back. She fell hard against his chest, clipping his chin with the top of her head. She spun from him and couldn’t help settling into a defensive stance, her hands poised as if ready to strike him.

He raised his own hands in a sign of surrender and it unnerved her that he didn’t smile. The gesture was playful; he didn’t actually expect her to hit him. And he was glad to see her, she could feel that pulsing from him as well. But none of this playfulness or joy reached that wide mouth that she had never actually seen smile. She didn’t understand, then, why she had expected one.

Rey relaxed and he lowered his hands. It was only then that she thought back to what he had said when he’d scared her.

“You want me?”

Something like pain broke over his face and his lips parted in a breath. “Gods, yes.”

She was attracted to him. She couldn’t deny that, not with him standing in the moonlight with his mouth open and his eyes hard on her.

“But you knew that.”

She did. He’d never said as much, but she knew it all the same. How he was looking at her now was exactly the way he’d looked at her the first time she’d seen him without his mask. He took a step toward her, and she let him. She took a step forward as well. He shifted and the moonlight shone on the taut, shiny white skin of his scar.

Rey raised a hand to his face, almost touching it, before drawing her hand away. “Why didn't you have that fixed? I'm sure the First Order had the means to graft your skin back to new.”

He brought his hand to his own face, tracing his thumb down the jagged slice of the scar. He huffed a rueful laugh. “It's an excuse to think about you.”

Rey felt heat rush to her face, bleed from her cheeks downward. Her breath caught in her chest and it took her a moment to respond. “Have you always been this outspoken?” she whispered, her words sounding shy in the night air. She didn’t know how to talk to someone like this; she never had before. She wasn’t coy and she wasn’t naive. Rey didn’t know why she felt like this with him. Possibly because she couldn’t keep it a secret even if she tried.

He turned to face her fully, looked hard at her, though she could not bring her eyes to meet his. “I’m a dying man, Rey.”

She squeezed her eyes shut at his almost conversational tone. Opened them and looked back to him. But the impassive look in his face was even worse. She focused her eyes on the gleaming metal of the Collar instead. She didn’t want to think of what he meant. The collar wasn’t slowly killing him. The only way it could kill him was if he chose---if he chose---to die.

“What time I have was bought with my most valuable truths,” he continued. “The fact that I savor the memory of your lapse into the Dark, that I seek out this maddening link between us, that I _want_ you, is a truth worth very little. It’s quite literally written across my face.”

She stared hard at the device tethering him to a sudden death---were he to take one step too far. That frantic energy was bubbling up in her again, and she felt like diving into the water to work it off.

“I'm not worth enough to lie, anymore. Least of all about my feelings toward you.”

She dodged around him, pulling off her robe and half tumbling into the water. She swam clumsily away from him, her heart hammering. She didn’t want him like that. He was pretty enough to look at, and his voice made her ache, but she wanted nothing to do with scars and feelings and confessions. Nothing at all.

Something pulled her to turn back, and she did. She faced the dock and treaded water, looking up at where he still stood. He was watching her, waiting. She nodded, though he shouldn’t be able to see it from this distance. He knew all the same and tugged off his boots and his shirt. The sight of his skin, even from this far away, spiked heat through her and she turned away again. She heard his splash into the water and waited, only the sounds of her own churning in the water to break the night’s silence. He didn’t resurface and she had only a moment’s warning, a thought that wasn’t entirely her own, to know what he was about to do. She took a deep breath and let him pull her under.

It seemed right that their first kiss was underwater. Slick and bubbled and suffocating. He pulled her to the surface to gulp at the night air and half dragged her back to the dock. It was hard to swim while trying to hold on to someone. It was hard to swim when all you wanted to do was sink.

He yanked her against one of the thick wooden legs of the pier, pinning her there as he grabbed the planks above her head and pressed into her. She wrapped herself around him, weightless in the water, and rolled her body against him. He kissed her again, their wet mouths moving over each other almost painfully as their teeth clacked together.

She moved a hand between them, stroked him hard over his pants and then dipping in to grip him skin to skin. A gasp broke their kiss apart as he shuddered against her. She stroked him, wondering if they’d fuck in the water or if they could pull themselves to the dock in time.

Kylo was muttering against her neck and she couldn’t make out his words. She slowed her pace and he whined, his words becoming clearer.

“--love you. Gods, I love you. I love you so much, I--”

She stopped, pushing him away from her, shaking her head so hard she felt dizzy. “Stop that! Don’t say that! Don’t--”

He lunged back at her, grabbing her hand and replacing it at his cock, lips at her neck once again. “Don’t stop. Please, please don’t stop. I just want the once. Just once with you. Just once before I--”

“Before you what?” she hissed, her voice shrill. What was he talking about? _Gods, I love you._ He didn’t know her. He’d hardly spoken to her. She was just a fascination, just--someone who was like him.

He stilled against her. His cock twitched in her hand and she realized he was crying.

He pulled himself from her, but didn’t look her in the eye.

“Will you go for a swim with me, Rey?”

She shook her head, not understanding. Not _wanting_ to understand. “I---”

“Just to the moon.” He pointed at the moon hanging low over the lake. It wasn’t quite full anymore. “Let’s just swim till we reach the moon.”

“What are you talking about, Kylo?” she whispered. “You’re scaring me.”

He was pulling her in the direction he was pointing, but there was nothing out there. Nothing but endless black water.

“I won’t be able to make it the whole way, it’s past where I can---but you can.” His voice was choked, tight and low and broken. “You can, Rey. You’re so strong. Once I stop swimming, just...just drag me. Just keep going. I won’t feel a thing. I won’t feel anything…”

She slapped him, crying herself now. “Stop it! Don’t say that! I won’t do that!”

He was sobbing so hard she was afraid he’d drown. But maybe he wanted that. She dragged him back to the dock, pulled him half limp out of the water with all the strength she had and tossed him heavy onto the planks. She shook him, not sure what else to do. She didn’t know how to convince a man who knew death so intimately as to wear it around his neck that he needed to _live._

“You’re worth something, Kylo Ren. You’re still worth something.”

He shook his head, the action wringing desperation from her. “You still have to teach me!” she shouted. She could see the officers approaching, coming to take him back. It was past his curfew, it would seem. “You still have to teach me, like you said.” She crawled over him, holding his wet face between her hands. He wouldn’t look at her. “We’re only at the beginning, Kylo. You said that you love me and I---it’s just the beginning! Give me time to---”

_She didn’t want him to die. She still didn’t want him to die._

The wardens were pulling him to his feet and looking at her like she was crazy. She was sobbing and wet and practically clinging to him. They had to shake her off him as they dragged him away.

“You’re still worth something!” she screamed after them.

 

 

* * *

 

“Have you heard?”

Rey was halfway through her morning oatmeal when a very excited Finn plopped down across from her.

“Heard what?”

Finn gave her a radiant, though secretive smile; he was obviously very glad to be the one who told her the news.

“He’s told us.”

“What?” Rey put down her spoon, her hand already shaking at the idea of who “he” might be.

“That bastard Kylo Ren. He’s told us where Snoke is.”

She gripped the edge of the table at the mention of his name and all the images of his face bathed in moonlight that came with it. “Are you sure?”

Finn nodded eagerly. “Yeah. They confirmed it just this morning.”

“That’s...wow.” She picked up her spoon again and nervously twirled it between her fingers. She felt like the room was closing in on her.

“You can say that again.”

Rey’s head was spinning. “So, what does that mean?”

“It means we’re going to win this thing,” Finn said with that smile that always calmed Rey’s troubles. “It means that you and Master Luke are about to make Resistance history.”

He reached across the table to take her hand. Squeezed it as his smile widened. “It means that bastard was actually worth something.”

Rey felt suddenly cold.

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a moment and let me know what you thought. I welcome any and all feedback, even if it's just to tell me that you hate me. :)


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